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Thursday, 18 May 2017

Don't Piss Off Tarim

MARGARET LISS:

A few years ago I scanned all of Dave Sim's notebooks. He had filled 36 notebooks during the years he created the monthly Cerebus series, covering issues #20 to 300, plus the other side items -- like the Epic stories, posters and prints, convention speeches etc. A total of 3,281 notebook pages detailing his creative process. I never really got the time to study the notebooks when I had them. Just did a quick look, scanned them in and sent them back to Dave as soon as possible. So this regular column is a chance for me to look through those scans and highlight some of the more interesting pages.

Time for a little something different. Loose pages. While Dave sent me many notebooks with many pages, there were a couple loose pages. Not the loose pages that were still with their notebook, these pages weren't with their notebook any more. There were eight loose pages, and seven appear to be torn from a sketchbook while the eighth appears to be a piece of typing paper. When I scanned them in, I put them in a sleeve with an arbitrarily given number so we knew which scans went with which pages.

This loose page shows Cerebus pissing himself and the thinking to himself about how he shouldn't piss off Tarim.

Loose page #2

I looked in Minds, and the closest to the Cerebus wetting himself I could find was a young Cerebus listening to the preacher on page 103 (Cerebus # 191 page 17). However, that Cerebus isn't standing, but sitting down. He also didn't immediately start in on the monologue shown. On page 114 Cerebus does start praying to Tarim with a similar theme, but not this dialogue.

These first seven loose pages all appear to be from Minds, with page number six being a full page sketch of a preliminary layout for page 150 of Minds (Cerebus #194, page 4):

Loose page #6

Once again, similar to the final page, but there are multiple differences. The dialogue doesn't match up - for either Dave's character or Cirin and Cerebus and Cirin's poses are different: